The Other Side Of The World
by Athena Alexandria
Summary: Based on the “Snake in the Mailbox” scene from Through the Looking Glass. Kate’s thoughts as she goes to see Jack at the airport.


I thought this one-shot (named after the KT Tunstall song) up after watching the "Snake in the Mailbox" scene on youtube. (Did it freak everyone else out? More than the Jacket kiss? Or was it just me?) It's a little depressing, but then seeing Jack like that depressed me, especially given the toll it appears to have taken on his relationship with Kate…

* * *

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

When she sees his name on the display, she ignores it, but still, he keeps trying, the shrill of her cell grating so heavily on her nerves that she has to turn it off.

It's been three years, four months and too many days since they got off that godforsaken island, and already it feels like a dream; a nightmare when she considers what he's become. They're calling him a hero on the news, and once, she would have believed it, but she doesn't know how he can still pull strangers out of burning wreckage when he can't even save himself. In no small way, it feels like she buried their leader back on the beach with Shannon and Boone and the others.

Sometimes she wishes she had, before things got this far.

For reasons she still doesn't understand, she was never convicted or sentenced to jail, but watching him punish himself, watching him turn into his father; _her_ father; is worse than any material prison. In the eighteen turbulent months that they were together, he never beat her like Wayne; for all his faults, he's still a better man than that; but he still manages to hurt her in ways she never thought he could. Sometimes she wonders if she would've been better off staying with Sawyer. At least with him she knew what she was signing up for.

After she turns off her phone, she tries to go about her life: sleep, work, errands, but she's so afraid of what he might do to himself that, in the end, she lets him get through. It's almost a relief to hear his voice; he sounds so lucid, so much like the man she fell in love with despite how broken he is that she agrees to meet him at the airport.

She still hopes that one day the old Jack will resurface; when he does, she'll fall back into his arms and everything will be right with the world again, but that day is not today. When she pulls up behind him, she almost doesn't recognise him standing by the gate; he has a beard now, and it makes him look older, like the ten or so years between is actually closer to twenty.

As she gets closer, taking in his stained wifebeater and jean jacket, she sees that he looks like hell, and she tells him so, but he's too out of it to care. He's beginning to smell; three months on an island with only the occasional shower and he never smelt like that, like sweat and booze, and she wonders when he last changed his clothes. He doesn't comment on her new hairstyle, or the conservative middle-class look she's adopted; he doesn't even seem to see her anymore, just his last link to the island, the one person he believes has the power to help him find it again.

But she can't. She has other priorities now. She needs to think about the future.

Nine months after their departure from the island, she gave birth to a son.

He wasn't there.

By that time, the cracks were beginning to show in their relationship. They fought all the time, and she thought about leaving him, but she wanted a family; the kind she'd never had; and she thought he did too. Even though they'd never been sure that the baby was his, and not Sawyer's, he'd said the same thing in the beginning, and she kept hoping that fatherhood would change him; that it would turn him back into the man she knew.

That he would accept defeat.

She didn't know where he was when she went into labour, so she left a message on his cell; he showed up hours later, drunk, yelling at her when she wouldn't let him hold the baby. She'd never seen him like that before, and it scared her, so much that she rang for the nurse and asked her to call security.

She was going to move out then, to get her own place, but when he came to pick her up, he brought flowers, and he was so good with the baby that she found herself believing that her wish had finally come true.

That he was trying.

But that night, when she got up to feed the baby, she found him passed out in his office with a bottle of scotch, his head resting on a pile of maps, the lines of which now made up his entire world.

When she asks him why he called, he shows her a tattered newspaper clipping, and asks her if she's going to the funeral, but she's over the whole thing: the island and all the intrigue that goes with it. She doesn't want to think about monsters and lists and murders made to look like suicide; she doesn't want to go back; she just wants to forget that they were ever there, that that place was real, and yet somehow, he keeps sucking her back in.

Like tonight.

She left her son with a neighbour; all she wants is to go home before he notices that she's gone. When she tells him that she has to go, that he'll be wondering where she is, he doesn't even ask: how he is, if he misses him. He hasn't seen his son in over a year, not since the night she packed their bags and left while he was at the bar. He was so out of it that it took him two days to notice that they were gone. When he did, she waited for him to ask her to come home, to help him get better, but he didn't, calling her cell at three a.m. to ramble about how they had to go back to the island, until she told him not to contact her anymore.

That was six months ago. Until she saw him on the news, she wasn't even sure that he was still alive. She knows he wasn't on that bridge to enjoy the view.

Halfway through their meeting, he stops being lucid again, and starts telling her that every Friday night, he flies to Tokyo, or Singapore, or even Sydney, hoping that his plane will crash again and he'll get back to the island that way.

It's Friday, and there's a plane leaving for Auckland in an hour. Maybe tonight it will, and he'll finally get what he wants, what he was trying to find on that bridge: absolution.

Tears cloud her vision as she leaves the airport, and Jack, driving back to her apartment in Malibu, where she knows her son will be waiting for her. He never sleeps well when she's not there; she enters his room to find him sitting upright in his toddler bed, clinging to the rail, his little face lighting up at the sight of her. He's wide awake now, but it's late, and she's tired, so she tucks him back in, waiting until his eyelids begin to flutter to kiss him goodnight.

Sometimes, she sees a lot of Jack in him; tonight is one of those nights, as he mumbles something about a dinosaur in his sleep. But he has dimples when he smiles, and she knows he didn't get them from her.

She still doesn't know who his father is, but when he stirs, looking up at her with his grey-green eyes, her own eyes, she realises that it doesn't matter anymore, because both of the men she loved are on the other side of the world to them now.

* * *

I know they wanted us to think that "he" is Sawyer, which tells me it isn't. This is just me taking artistic licence. I actually think it'll be an entirely new (normal) guy with no link to the island, which is why Kate is so reluctant to be dragged back into that world... 


End file.
